President Obama recently announced $3.4 billion in grants to certain municipal districts, utility companies, and manufacturers to further drive the nation’s transition to a technologically advanced smart grid power structure. This grid would allow more efficient energy delivery and real-time usage monitoring.

And almost simultaneously, the University of Illinois’ Information Trust Institute issued a press release announcing $18.8 million in grants from the U.S. Department Energy and the Department of Homeland Security to four academic establishments to fund a five-year study into securing the new smart grid. This research project is designed to ensure that the devices that constitute the grid will be secured against hackers and other malicious attacks.

But by the time this five-year study is finished, most of the country will have already implemented the smart grid in some capacity, without the security deemed necessary by the government-funded research project, leaving the grid vulnerable to attack.

And these vulnerabilities are well documented. According to a recent article on Wired.com’s Threat Level blog,

Earlier this year IOActive, a computer security firm in Washington state, was contracted to examine the security of smart meters deployed by an unnamed utility company in the northwest. [They] developed a malicious worm that, in a simulated attack, was able to spread from meter to meter to take out power in more than 15,000 homes in 24 hours.

However, according to Department of Energy spokeswoman Jen Stutsman, any organization receiving funds for the smart grid was required to supply a security plan addressing known risks and how those risks would be handled.

Tags: smart meters, smart-grid, worm

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.